GitHub: The top 10 programming languages for machine learning

While you might think that machine learning is reserved for developers well-versed in languages like R and Python, you’d be wrong.

Online code repository GitHub has pulled together the 10 most popular programming languages used for machine learning hosted on its service, and, while Python tops the list, there’s a few surprises on there.

Web-scripting language turned jack-of-all trades JavaScript finds its way to number three on the list, data science-focused newcomer and Python rival Julia makes number six, Shell scripts are bundled together at number seven, and big-data favorite Scala is at number 10.

The rankings are based on the primary languages used in code repositories tagged as related to machine-learning, according to GitHub.

They almost certainly don’t reflect which languages are most commonly used for machine learning. A recent Kaggle survey of data scientists flagged Python as the most popular language and R as the language they are most likely to use at work.

But if you only know JavaScript or another language less commonly associated with machine learning and want to dabble in a spot of computer vision or natural language processing, then it’s good to know it’s at least possible.

These are the top 10 machine learning languages on GitHub, according to the site’s figures.

1. Python

Highly rated machine-learning repositories

sci-kit learn: Popular library for data mining and data analysis that implements a wide-range of machine-learning algorithms.